Hooded Gainsborough Primary School pupils leave desks to spraypaint playground wall
Pupils set to work as part of the spray paint art project
Pupils abandoned their desks earlier this month and swapped pencil cases for aerosol canisters to leave their mark on a wall in their school playground.
Luckily this was all in the name of art.
Ekta Ekta, an artist from Gothenburg, Sweden, swooped in to help guide the young painters from Gainsborough Primary School in Hackney Wick.
The school is a duck’s wing beat from the Lee Navigation canal and close to where Ekta has painted several canalside works at Queen’s Yard.
Children from Year Six brainstormed ideas for their colourful mural with Cedar Lewisohn, an artist, curator and expert in street art.
Mr Lewisohn, 35, said: “The kids were so excited about it, especially about the idea of being able to use spray paint.
“I went in and gave an introductory talk and they kept saying ‘Are we going to be able to use spray paint?’
“One person would ask the question and then a few minutes later someone else would put their hand up and say ‘But are we going to be able to use spray paint?’ They were really keen on the idea.”
Ekta is one of several international artists who was commissioned by charity The Legacy List to create canal murals, and the organisation is being supported by Bloomberg LP, and is a creative partnership with the Canal and River Trust.
Other artists who have been commissioned to create canalside works include Interesni Kazki, from Kiev, Ukraine, and Teo Moneyless from Lucca, Italy.
Tony Hales, chair at Canal & River Trust, said, “East London’s urban canals and rivers have been regenerated by the Olympic Games and the Canal & River Trust is pleased to be supporting The Canals Project, which will continue this transformation. This tremendously exciting project is part of an evolving dialogue about how art can change perceptions, particularly amongst young people, of the waterways that run through the heart of their communities.”
‘Colourful murals’, ‘street art’ – call it what you like, they are invariably an eyesore as far as the majority of residents are concerned. Thankfully this latest piece of authorised vandalism was confined to a school playground but overall, this sort of activity should not be encouraged. Pupils can express artistic merit on paper, canvas or a whole host of non-intrusive mediums – there is no need to blight an area by painting on outside walls.
Hear, hear! I’m glad that you said what we were all thinking, Titus. I mean, the very idea that children, these little motes of embodied music, should be encouraged into the creation of a something gigantic and colourful is just appalling. The proper thing to do here is to petition the Education Secretary to set standards for a maximum allowable canvas size for children’s art; say, DIN A4, or better yet, link canvas size to age, so that younger ‘artists’ might begin with the back of an Oyster receipt and then work their way slowly up to the prescribed maximum format. If the reckless application of paint to brickwork highlighted by this article were allowed to continue unchecked, there is no telling what future harm may be caused by showing yet more children that they have the freedom to be creatively ambitious.